Donald Trump, Climate Warrior?

The climatistas just can’t help themselves. Amidst the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left since Trump’s triumph, the environmentalists have wailed the loudest. We’re doomed! One climatista, University of Arizona emeritus professor Guy McPherson, is predicting that humans will go extinct in just ten more years:

The University of Arizona emeritus professor says in 10 years, humans will cease to exist. Abrupt rises in temperature have us on course for the sixth mass extinction – similar to one that happened about 252 million years ago that culminated in the “great dying”.

That event was the worst of the mass extinction events in our planet’s history and saw all complex life cease, leaving microbes and fungi to rule the planet. “I think we are heading for something like that this time around, too,” McPherson said. “I just don’t see how very complex, very complicated organisms that depend upon so many other species, such as humans, I just don’t see how we get through that.”

It’s almost an outcome to be wished for it only to make people like McPherson stop spouting this climatic Gore.

But if you really want to send a climatista into a fit of rage, just try out the entirely plausible suggestion that greenhouse gas emissions are likely to fall faster under President Trump that they would have under Madam President Hillary. Berkeley physicist Richard Muller makes the case:

Carbon-dioxide emissons will be lower under Trump than they would have been under Clinton. Trump appears to favor nuclear power and shale gas, and both reduce carbon emissions substantially, at least when compared to coal. If you are optimistic about solar and wind, then you can say that shale will not reduce emissions as much as solar and wind would have. I saw no similar support for these energy technologies from Clinton, who seemed to agree with the Obama approach: don’t oppose, but don’t reduce the impediments.

The key issue is the developing world. If the US surges ahead with nuclear, then it might induce the developing world to be less fearful of it. If they build nuclear plants instead of coal plants, we might actually slow and stop global warming. . .

As much as the Obama administration was eager to sign treaties and accords, those agreements were not designed to reduce emissions from the developing world. Alas, most of the future emissions are projected to come from the developing world; unless we help them control them, any action that is aimed at the US or Europe will not do the job.

So I am optimistic. The push for nuclear and shale gas that I expect from Trump could result in substantially lower CO2 emissions world-wide.

You can just hear the climatistas sputtering: “But, but. but . . . the Paris Accord! All of our fancy international meetings? The validation of our self-worth it at stake! It can’t be allowed.”